Artist: Paul Nash
Title: The Sunflower Rises (preliminary watercolour sketch)
Date: 1945
In the years before his death, the English artist Paul Nash (1889-1946) painted
what a Thames & Hudson
dictionary describes as 'landscapes..
and symbolic pictures of an intense and mystical quality...'
'The Sunflower Rises' is an example of this period that falls within a category
termed by the artist AERIAL FLOWERS.
In an article published in Counterpoint magazine, 1945, Paul Nash wrote of his attraction to the idea of being able to fly, and how this preoccupation was a factor in the genesis of his 'Aerial Flowers' series of pictures. Here is an excerpt:
'..Of one thing I was now certain: modern methods of flying were fundamentally
unsatisfying, possibly even unsound. The misconception seemed to lie in making
the flying apparatus heavier than air. development along these lines led inevitably
only to bigger and noisier machines with greater capacity for crowding, whereas
the essence of the virtue of flying was the escape into the vast lonely spaces
in complete freedom of bodily action and, above everything, in silence. Another
bore about modern flying was, it seemed to me, having to travel at such a
terrific speed, that being the principal ideal in fact....
I began to dream of other methods, new aerial adventures.
It was at this point I encountered my first aerial flowers. I say 'encountered'
because they were hardly thought about in the sense of being planned, yet
I regard them as a direct result of my imagining in my almost subconscious
search for flight expression. They are, I suppose, equivalents of some sort...'
